Facebook security flaw makes private chats public

Facebook said Wednesday a security flaw allowed many users to see the private chats of their friends.

The flaw was first reported on TechCrunch this morning, complete with a video demonstration of how the exploit works. Facebook disabled the chat feature on the site to deal with the situation. In a statement to press, Facebook officials said they were aware of the problem.

"For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users' chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the "preview my profile" feature of Facebook privacy settings," the statement read.

"When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented."

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No matter how robust your security, or how diligent your employees, network credentials are a free pass for cybercriminals. This is mostly because employees are relied upon for their own password management. And with more than 4.8 billion sets of stolen credentials said to be available online, odds are that at least a few of your employees’ user IDs and passwords are just waiting to be used by unscrupulous outsiders. Are you ready to stop them?

Cyber resilience will be particularly important as Australian organisations face increased pressure to quickly detect, respond to, and manage the repercussions of breaches in the wake of 2018’s Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme.

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